Foster teens pool talents in STEM camp
Seven students sat with sheets of white paper, pencils and a problem to solve. A large TV monitor, a set of crutches and a 3D printer were at the front of the room.
The problem at hand: A man who suffered a broken leg in a car crash all but lost his ability to work in his garden. Water causes the crutches to
easily sink in the mud, and using a hose and crutches simultaneously is difficult.
It was up to the students to make the man’s life easier, and their instructor, Kris Kling, repeatedly assured them that they could do it. And they would do it together.
“Every team has many talents,” Kling told them, emphasizing that no proposal was too far-fetched. One person came up with a way to control off-and-on cycles of the hose through an app so that the man didn’t even need to go outside. A few suggested a modified boot for the bottom of the crutches to minimize the mud issue, kind of like a cross-country ski.
“If we take the best of all the boots,” Kling said, “we’ll build a super boot.”
This was the scene on the second day of a summer camp at the PAST Foundation’s Innovation Lab on the Northwest Side, a place that feels like a 22ndcentury school.
The camp, now in its second year, is hardly traditional — it has a robotic component, after all. With its curriculum rooted in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, its outcome, organizers
hope, is transformational. That’s because the 30 students who were selected to participate are all in the foster-care system, vulnerable youths who have historically faced challenges in education. A child in foster care is twice as likely to be absent than peers are, according to a report from the American Bar Association’s Legal Center for Foster Care and Education. Other research has found that fewer than 60% of foster children graduate from high school by age 19.
The systemic forces creating these barriers include childhood trauma, frequent transfers between schools, and undiagnosed behavioral or health conditions, according to the Ohio Department of Education.
The camp’s focus is not only on providing skills in STEM fields, such as using computer-assisted design to create 3D-printed prototypes of their crutch modifications, but also on providing more-general skills that can translate into the workforce, such as making presentations, working as a team and building a digital portfolio to showcase skills and accomplishments.
“STEM is the glue that holds it all together,” said Andy Bruening, director of bridge programs at the PAST Foundation, a nonprofit focused on education innovation.
Students participate at no cost and get paid for up to 20 hours per week through a partnership with IMPACT Community Action, a nonprofit that works to reduce poverty, Bruening said. The camp is for students 16 to 18 years old, and they’re divided into two cohorts of 15 students each. It runs until early August.
Last year, four of the 19 participants had landed jobs by the end of the camp, causing them to miss the graduation ceremony, Bruening said.
“It was perfect,” Bruening said. “We were sad they weren’t here, but happy they got jobs.”
Stacie, a 17-year-old rising junior at Northland High School, participated in last year’s pilot program and is one of 13 students who are back for a second year.
“I liked how we never could work by ourselves,” Stacie said. “We always had to work in a group.”
(The Dispatch is identifying the foster-care youths only by their first names for privacy reasons.)
Although Stacie helped program an underwater, remotely operated vehicle to maneuver an obstacle course last year, she said the thing she learned most from the camp was better communication skills. Instead of ROVS, this year’s camp will work on coding drones to accomplish a task, Bruening said.
Stacie said she wants to work either as a nurse or in cosmetology. But no matter which field she chooses, she said that lessons from the camp will be applicable because she knows she’ll always be solving problems.
The solution to gardening with a broken leg that 18-year-old Teriana presented to the class involved a backpack that can store water and has a connector hose. She explained why she thought that would be easier to control while using crutches.
After the students’ presentations, the next step was feeding all their ideas into a computer-assisted design program. After that, Kling hoped, the 3D printer would bring them to life.
Teriana, a recent graduate of Whitehall Yearling High School, isn’t sure what her next step is in life, but she decided to participate in the camp “to get the experience and see if I’m interested in any of this.”
So far, “I like that it’s new,” Teriana said. “Everything is new.”
kstankiewicz@dispatch.com @kevin_stank